‘Overwatch’ Bans Hundreds Of Players For Bad Behavior

Back in September, Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan promised that his team was going to start cracking down on players exhibiting patterns of bad behavior. He even pointed out that over 480,000 Overwatch accounts had received punishment since the game launched. Now. Dot Esports reported that hundreds of Overwatch bans were just handed down.

The New Overwatch Bans

According to the report, the hundreds of Overwatch bans took place on accounts in China. All the banned accounts were even listed on the Blizzard forums. This giant rash of bans came due to problems such as “griefing” and “trolling.”

While trolling is a widespread problem in online gaming, it is against the Overwatch code of conduct. As Jeff Kaplan said in September, this is something that Blizzard plans to take very seriously in order to ensure fun gaming experiences for everyone.

As previously reported, Kaplan responded to a player who claimed unfair treatment on the Blizzard forums and pointed out that the player complaining had 2,247 complaints against him. This caused Kaplan to lay out what Blizzard had planned.

Blizzard implemented their “permanent ban system,” which means that a person just needs to have three or more seasonal bans to lose the right to ever play in Competitive Play again. This won’t stop players from playing regular gameplay, but it is intended to protect the integrity of Competitive Play.

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The Future At Overwatch

The entire idea for Jeff Kaplan and the Overwatch development team is to remove the toxicity that chases good players away. They want to keep the environment friendly and fun for all. With over 480,000 accounts punished since launch, that is something that needed work.

However, it looks like the Overwatch players in China that received the ban were determined to troll the game. Kotaku translated some of the names on the banned list, and it turns out that the names themselves were trolling.,

When translated, some of the Overwatch player’s English translation names included “The world could always use more butts” and “Ugly guy with thick lip and smelly feet.”

Sadly, the fact that Blizzard and Jeff Kaplan are busy punishing people and sending out Overwatch bans means there is little time to work on improvements. Kaplan said he would rather create a replay system or match history system but toxic players make it hard to do anything but police the game.